Re: New Graphical Outliner--"Personal Memory Manager"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 5072

Posted by stephenz
2006-01-17 13:19:18

I will be interested in hearing any comments about Personal Memory Manager. I had seen this application some time ago but dismissed it without even trying it out because the web site seemed amateurish and I didn’t get a sense of what it really did. After being reminded about it by Stephen’s note, I downloaded the program and tried it out for a half an hour. Is that enough time to really get a sense of a program? Yes and no. What seems clear to me is that this program does have a unique and innovative take on information management/creative processing. The core of this is the worksheet, which is basically a blank page into which you can drag notes you’ve created, building a diagram that visually represents the relationship between notes. This could be a powerful tool, especially since notes can be included in any number of worksheets, and relationships can be built between notes. The problem is that for this to be really useful, you would need to use this program as your main information receptical, capturing and storing all your information here, and it just seems to fall flat on its face in this regard. It has no ability to clip information from other sources, no meta data with which to keyword or otherwise classify the notes (other than with relationships and worksheets), and makes most every task somewhat labor intensive. To put it another way, without the worksheet function, no one would ever consider using this program to manager his or her information. So the question is, is the the one powerful (and innovative) feature worth the hefty compromise? I don’t think so, but I’d be very interested in hearing other comments. It is possible that PMM might have some facility on a project by project basis. I’d have to work with it some more to get a sense of that.

Steve Z.

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